YouTube Marketing

YouTube is an incredibly powerful marketing tool.

Most people don’t know it, but YouTube is the #2 most used search engine in the world (second only to Google). That means more people search for videos on YouTube than use Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine.

Like we said, it’s powerful. Here are a few more stats to prove our point:

More than 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month. (YouTube)

More than 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. (YouTube)

72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. (YouTube)

52% of business execs watch work-related videos on YouTube on a weekly basis. (eMarketer & Forbes)

These stats show that YouTube is a very powerful marketing platform that reaches 800 million unique users each month, including senior executives. In addition, 70.8% of internet users watched video last year which is up 7.1% from 2011 (Hubspot).

With this much video being watched online, how can you take advantage of the trend and get positive impressions for your brand? Let’s talk about that now.

Step 1: Get onto YouTube

The first step is to get your business onto Google and to start using it. You will need to create a channel for your brand and start uploading videos.

These videos can be interviews with people within your organization, videos you produce about your company, or an explainer video. The exact type of video you produce doesn’t matter as much as finding a way to begin producing videos and posting them onto YouTube.

Whole Foods provides an excellent example. They have a channel where with everything from beauty tips to behind the scenes looks to store opening videos. They currently have 8,848 subscribers and 6,313,514 views. The large number of videos they’ve produced has allowed them to amass an impressive number of views and to rank for a large array of search terms.

Step 2: Advertise on YouTube

The next step is to consider advertising on YouTube. Your video can show up on the top of search results as a sponsored video, or it can be set to play as an opening commercial before a video begins.

The benefit of advertising on YouTube is that you will reach more of the 8 million or so people who use the site each month. This will extends your reach and gives your brand more exposure.

Step 3: Optimize for Search

The next thing you can do is optimize your videos for search. We won’t go into detail about how to do that in this post, but the basic premise is that you want to do keyword research in order to optimize your videos for words that people search for the most frequently. The easiest tool to use for this is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Once you conduct the keyword research, how do you optimize your video? It’s fairly simple. First, you use the keywords you found in the title for the video. YouTube (and Google) weighs the words used in the title quite heavily.

After that, you’ll want to use as many keywords as possible in the description and as tags. It’s important to remember that search engines depend 100% on words. They base ranking on the words used within a piece of content and the words used to link to that content. When it comes to video, the only words search engines can use to categorize and rank them is the title, the description, tags, and incoming links, so you want to make sure and use the right keywords for each of these.

Search engine optimization also happens to be a huge bonus when it comes to getting more views with video. Why? It’s because YouTube videos have a tendency to rank higher and faster than other pieces of content. All else being equal, a well-produced YouTube video with a decent number of views has a better chance of ranking highly for a topic than a blog post with similar content.

Wrap-Up

As I’m sure you’re fully aware, explainer videos are a great way to create content for YouTube. Once the video’s made, it can live on YouTube and attract views for as long as you use it.

And who knows what kind of attention it will attract. We had one customer close a $800k deal from a single video alone. That’s definitely the kind of content you want to post on YouTube and have found by search engines.

You can also use your explainer video as an ad within YouTube. Explainer videos make for great ads since they’re highly engaging and help viewers remember more of what they see and hear.

If you’d like to create an explainer video for YouTube, get in touch today. We’ll be happy to talk about your project and find out if we’re a good fit for working together.

YouTube Marketing was last modified: February 16th, 2015 by Brandon Houston